Ken Dixon: New name, old story for top administrators

Published 6:45 pm, Friday, October 12, 2012

How's that Regency thing doing?

When I think of a Regency, up conjures images of inscrutable, highly educated, wizard-like men and women, reposing around a huge table in powdered wigs, sparkling water fizzing away in wine glasses, bowls of figs, possibly a crystal-ball centerpiece.

Winged monkeys enter and leave the room's windows with messages of pressing importance to and from the farthest reaches of the empire. They're conversing in hushed tones about high-minded policies of enlightenment.

In fact, it's a new-fangled name for the old state board of higher education. Gov. Dannel Malloy's renaming it apparently didn't exactly mask its potential for memorable aromatics.

Talk about imperious educators, leave it to academics to thoroughly embarrass themselves, splashing a little blood on the governor along the way, as if he could use any more negative proximity.

The story is within the saga of the relatively new Board of Regents for Higher Education and how its president, Robert Kennedy, unilaterally approved 21 raises for staff members totaling more than a quarter-million bucks, including about $48,000 for old political hand Mike Meotti, the executive vice president and former state education commissioner, who finally read the writing on the wall and resigned late Friday afternoon.

The pay-raise maneuver, which after a few days of fulminating led to Kennedy's resignation Friday morning, was first sussed out by Jacqueline Rabe Thomas of the online CT Mirror.

It's a classic story that plays itself out all too often: Cozy bureaucrats taking care of each other, even while the people who actually deliver "higher education," the instructors and professors, see themselves with reduced benefits. Students, for whom the institutions supposedly operate, pay the escalating prices in heftier tuitions in a deal to win a sheepskin.

In the classic pay-raise story, officials try to paper it over while the reporter is aggressively told by education officials that there's "no story here," and the cover-up ensues.

This story line always ends up with people losing their jobs. Kennedy left saying he didn't want the issue to remain a "distraction." Distraction to whom? To the unpaid board? They didn't even know about the raises until every education reporter in the state was crawling all over the story early last week.

By Thursday afternoon, Democratic and Republican lawmakers held a news conference in the Capitol to call for Kennedy's resignation.

The higher up in the education food chain, the less actual teaching goes on. From grade school administrators, to high schools, to community colleges and state universities, administrators let the actual teachers do the work and take the heat.

It's a beautiful thing for administrators who, thanks to a culture of testing instituted by the last President Bush, have never been more powerful. There's a reason for the tried-and-true axiom about "those who can't teach," become administrators.

You award pay raises without an open process, you cheat the taxpayers who underwrite much of the $290 million operating budget of the Board of Regents for Higher Education; along with the parents and students faced with tuition creep.

Robert Kennedy, who lost his $340,000 job plus $25,000 in incentives -- as if he were an All Star shortstop -- plus 40 days vacation, also had $25,000 in so-called unvouchered expenses.

So let's retool his base pay to $360,000. That's more than twice Malloy's salary at a time when most state employees haven't had a raise for three years. Get real.

The regents on Friday gathered around a long table in downtown Hartford and agreed to name Phil Austin, the former UConn president, to be the interim president. Austin, you might recall, was the president of UConn during the "UConn 2000" building boom, which was accompanied by reports of shoddy construction that failed to meet code, including buildings without adequate fire-suppression systems.

Since the higher education department is a stand-alone organization, neither the governor nor the Office of Policy and Management were in a position to monitor Kennedy.

So now, nobody in state government's 50,000-employee work force looks good, at a time when $5.5 million was recently approved for new faculty, and campuses including Western Connecticut State University are erecting new buildings and expanding their curricula. The good news gets washed away like an early fall rain storm.

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Leave it to the school administrators to ignore another old slogan: people who forget history are doomed to repeat it.